"At next week's Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it's going to be something completely different."

Well, really, had BeOS been developed all this time it really would be the perfect OS for this. The API forces programmers to use mutliple threads in the applications. So every application that has ever and will ever be in existance for BeOS supports multiple processors.

Having multiple threads for apps, windows, input devices, etc. is good for GUI latency, but it does not help much if you want to watch a movie, for example. In BeOS (almost) all algorithms doing real work are sequential and this is in no way different to Windows and Linux. Parallelizing those algorithms is very difficult and error-prone, when using C++. Also, hardware-threading is too heavy-weight for massive concurrency (tens of thousands of threads).

Forget BeOS; it does not at all make writing parallel algorithms simpler. Instead, use a programming language that is made for concurrency. Intel should also have a plan how to make software utilize their cores.